VICTORIA - Though George Abbott’s retirement from politics was being reported everywhere by the time he got around to making it official Thursday morning, still the media turnout was heavy enough to make cramped quarters of his Victoria office.

As well as doing a lot heavy lifting in successive cabinet posts over almost a dozen years, Abbott was also renowned for a quick, dry wit. If nothing else, the event promised to be entertaining. Genial George did not disappoint.

“I do want to put to rest the rumour that my wife and I are having baby,” he began, drawing a knowing laugh from the assembled members of the press gallery.

One day earlier we’d heard once and future leadership candidate Kevin Falcon profess to be leaving politics mostly because his wife WAS having a baby.

Later in the press conference, Abbott would footnote another aspect of Falcon’s ambitions (“never say never”) when he told reporters that as regards his own possible return to elected office,”never is never for me.”

What might be his next move, once his term is up at the next election? Higher education was one possibility for the man who has been in charge of K-12 education for the past 18 month.

Abbott, who taught political science before winning provincial office in 1996, has a master’s degree from the University of Victoria. He’s thought about seeking a doctorate. Then again, he quickly added, he’s been told (not least by one of his sons, a pending PhD in economics) that those entail “a lot of work.”

There followed a brazen, albeit tongue-in-cheek, pitch for an honorary degree from one of the province’s universities. So he can have prestige without the effort, the perfect accolade for a retired politician.

Media scrums? “These are the most special moments of my life.”

Anything about his time in office that he’d do differently? Cue Frank Sinatra: “Regrets, I’ve had a few.”

Those five years in Opposition? “The longest 50 years of my life ... I would not relish the thought of going back there.”

Still he insisted that it was not the fear of being returned to the Opposition benches after the next election that prompted his decision to retire.

Rather, after 33 years in public life, half in local government, half at the provincial level, he figured he’d stayed long enough at the fair.

The legislature (where he also did a one-year stint as an intern back in the 1970s) had become “my personal Hotel California.” Yes, the Eagles song that included the line “you can check out any time you like but you can never leave,” as well as “I was thinking to myself, this could be heaven or this could be hell.”

But seriously folks.

Already in the first term of B.C. Liberal government, Abbott was thinking about reaching his best-before date. “I know that I’m much closer to the end of my political career than I am to the beginning of it,” he mused back in 2003. “There is a life beyond politics, and someday I hope to explore some of the opportunities in the private sector and elsewhere.”

By the end of the party’s second term in government, he considered not running again, having spent four years in the health portfolio, “the longest 40 years of my life” — not least because of an ugly behind-the-scenes clash with premier Gordon Campbell, who thought Abbott did not show sufficient enthusiasm for the premier’s jumped-up Conversation on Health.

At a pivotal caucus meeting at Harrison Hot Springs in 2007, Campbell kept interrupting Abbott during a presentation on the public feedback to the so-called “conversation.”

An exasperated minister finally asked the boss if he’d like to come up and handle the presentation. His stock went up in the caucus room after that episode.

When Campbell stepped down after the harmonized sales tax debacle in late 2010, Abbott jumped into the race for succession, backed by many of the MLAs who were on the “outs” with the departing leader.

Contrasting his approach to Campbell’s, candidate Abbott promised to change the political culture of the province, based on a “collaborative” model that would involve more points of view, inside and outside of government.

Party supporters also got a glimpse of the less-affable side of his personality, as he took some negative swipes at front-runner Christy Clark. As the lone candidate from the Interior (his riding is Shuswap), Abbott misjudged the degree to which his campaign was falling short in and around Metro Vancouver.

“We thought we were in second place and fairly solidly in second place,” he said after the votes were counted, adding that he was still trying to figure out, “why, when our polling showed that, we ended up in third.”

The loss ended any thought of staying beyond the next election. “There is something exciting in the opportunity to lead,” he told reporters. Without that spur, he was content to leave to others what he described as a job of “digging the party out of the ditch” of public opinion — an “unenviable task,” as he put it Thursday, not disguising the challenge ahead for the woman who defeated him in the leadership.

Laugh lines notwithstanding, it didn’t sound as if he’s expecting a happy ending for the Liberals.

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